Heart and Lungs

Scientists are getting closer to determining what actually controls and triggers a heartbeat. The better these processes can be understood, the more easily they can be replicated by synthetic and mechanical devices. Artificial organs and appendages of old were efforts to replace the missing or damaged original with something good enough to allow the person to continue to function. Research such as this with the heart will allow artificial organs to first replicate, that is, copy exactly the natural mechanisms via synthetic means. And once replication is achieved, improvement is an obvious next step.

On a macro level, several teams are working on engineering “lungs” for the Earth, trying to pick up where the Earth’s natural air filter, plants, have been unable to keep up. In terms of our atmosphere, the rise of industrial capitalism seems to have been the equivalent of taking up smoking while training for Olympic running. 20th Century development damaged the very things, forests and plankton beds, that cleaned the air that was becoming ever more polluted. So now we have to build artificial ones to pick up the slack. David Keith of the University of Calgary and his student Joshuah Stolaroff have developed what seems to me to be the most promising:

The ETH concept is a modified version of an energy-generating technology called concentrated solar power that has been blossoming lately in deserts around the world (New Scientist, 10 April 2004, p 26). Such power plants consist of fields of sun-tracking mirrors that focus sunlight to generate steam that drives a generator. “We remove the boiler,” explains Steinfeld. “We put our solar reactor there. In this we remove CO₂ from the air.”

Steinfeld’s reactor is a transparent tube filled with pellets of calcium oxide. In the table-top version the tube is a few centimetres high and an arc lamp replaces the sun. As the light heats the tube and its contents to 400 °C, air mixed with a small amount of steam is pumped in at the bottom and up through the pellets. At this temperature, the calcium oxide reacts with CO₂ to form calcium carbonate. “By the time the air leaves, there is no CO₂,” says Steinfeld. “We go from 385 parts per million to practically zero.”

[New Scientist]